Cookie Policy

What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a small text file a website asks your browser to keep, so that the next request your browser makes carries something the site can recognise. Ours mostly hold a random string. On their own they say very little about you. Joined to enough other records by companies that do exactly that for a living, they can say a great deal.

Two close relatives of the cookie do similar work and are treated the same way here. Local storage keeps values in your browser without attaching them to every request, and we use it to remember your consent choice and whether you prefer a dark or light view. Pixels, sometimes called tags, are tiny invisible files whose only job is to be requested, which tells a server that a page or an advertisement loaded. Your consent covers these too.

The four kinds we use

Everything set on this site falls into one of four buckets, and only the first is exempt from asking you first. We keep the list at four on purpose, because a category list long enough to look impressive is usually one nobody has audited.

Strictly necessary. Load balancing, security and abuse protection, and remembering that you already answered the banner. These run without consent because the site cannot be served without them.
Preferences. Light or dark, text size, notices you have already dismissed. Losing these breaks nothing except your patience.
Analytics. Counting readers and pages, seeing whether anyone reached the end of a long article, telling a genuine surge on a big story from an automated script.
Advertising. Set by the ad server and the exchanges filling our display space. They limit how often you see the same advertisement, measure whether it was actually visible, detect click fraud, and, where you have consented, select advertisements from a profile built elsewhere.

The advertising bucket is what pays for the reporting, and it is the only one we would drop tomorrow if the money worked another way, a point our ownership and funding page makes as well.

Who else sets cookies here

We set very few ourselves. Most come from third parties, which we describe by category: the delivery network that gets pages to you quickly, our analytics provider, the ad server and the programmatic exchanges bidding on our space with their own downstream partners, the newsletter service, and occasionally an embedded video or map inside a story.

We will not print a vendor list in prose, because ours changes and a stale list published confidently is worse than none at all. The consent manager holds the current one, naming each company, what it says it does, and the legal basis it claims. If a name in there worries you, refuse that vendor and read the site anyway.

Personalised advertising, and what changes if you say no

With your consent, the exchanges may use an identifier to select advertisements based on what has been inferred about you across other sites and apps. Refuse, and we serve contextual advertising instead: advertisements chosen by what the page is about and roughly where in the world the request came from, with no profile involved. A story about travel gets travel advertising because of the story, not because of you.

Refusing costs you nothing here. No article is withheld, no timer starts running, and the banner does not reappear a few paragraphs later dressed as something else. It does cost us money, because non personalised space pays less, and we would rather say so plainly than hide the trade behind a pre ticked box. Advertisers are told the same thing, which our advertise page sets out.

Changing your answer, and browser controls

Your consent is not a door that locks behind you. The consent manager reopens from the footer on every page, shows what you chose last time, and lets you switch any category or any single vendor on or off. A withdrawal takes effect on the next page you load. Readers in regions with a right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information will find that control in the same place, and we honour the Global Privacy Control signal.

Your browser sits underneath all of this and outranks us. Every current browser can block third party cookies, clear what is stored for a site, or refuse cookies entirely, usually under a privacy or site settings menu, and private browsing windows discard everything when you close them. Blocking all cookies will also erase the memory of your consent choice, which means the banner greets you every visit, an irony we have not yet found a way around.

How long they last, and what to read next

Session cookies vanish when you close the browser. Our consent record is kept for a limited period and then we ask again, because a choice made a year ago is not a current answer. Preference values persist until you clear them, analytics identifiers run for up to around fourteen months, and advertising cookies last from a day to roughly two years depending on the vendor. The exact figure for each is in the consent manager rather than here, where it would go stale. What happens to the data once collected, and the rights you hold over it, is in our privacy policy. Questions go to support@newfoundtimes.com with PRIVACY at the front of the subject line.